The disconnect between sales & Marketing

Why aren’t your marketing efforts bearing fruit?  You are trying everything.  Creating brochures, developing mounds of content for inbound marketing, and slick sales presentations.  Yet you are either having issues generating sales leads, or initialing productive sales dialogs.

My contention is that a wide majority of folks I meet have a disconnect between the needs of the sales team and what marketing is doing to help.  In a recent Corporate Visions Survey of B2B managers, only 10% believe that they have complete coordination between demand generation and sales enablement.

“Marketing” has lost its way.  When you pare everything down, is your marketing team actually working hand-in-hand with the sales team to fashion the actual verbal conversation that will make the sales staff effective when they speak to prospects?  This is the foundation of leveraging creative and strategic marketers for the purpose of strengthening sharp sales hunters.

The marketing team needs to take a step back, reassess the purpose of the work they are doing.  The real purpose is to help sales get leads and convince prospects to purchase.  If you can get your marketing and sales professionals to reconnect and start from square one you may find that your sales engine will start to produce like a well-oiled machine. 

By bringing marketers into the sales dialog planning process, you will integrate their ability to identify opportunities and create meaningful content – starting with the sales conversation. 

Creating a sales conversation is not a creative process. It is a collaborative process that is highly strategic.  It actually starts with working together to gain a clear understanding on product, prospects, USPs and conversation maps.

Once that strategy and conversation is created.  Then the media ecosystem you create will truly support much of your sales efforts.